David Carr of the New York Times was one of the featured guests at Wednesday’s Ask Roulette at Housing Works, along with Starlee Kine (of This American Life), Kurt Braunohler (of Hot Tub w/Kristen Schaal) and Dave Hill (also TAL and elsewhere). The room was packed and Carr was in sharp, biting form as you might have expected (especially if you saw Page One), and these three clips provide a little insight into the things that can make him be drenched in sweat first thing in the morning.

With comedian Dave Hill on the left and host Jody Avirgan of WNYC (off screen), answering a question from Hill, “What is your least favorite time of week?”

Answering a question about whether he’s afraid of turbulence on a flight, and talking a little about his upcoming trip to Russia to promote Page One.

The Washington Post, making really apt use of Facebook poll technology.

So weather journalism doesn’t change as technology changes. I hope the print editions across the country are still breaking the news that temperatures increase during the summer on an annual basis from this year back throughout all of recorded history.

The speech by Radiolab host Robert Krulwich is one of the best (only?) optimistic things I’ve read about journalism since I saw newspapers my friends and I worked for take a nosedive in quality over the past five years. And it’s certainly one of the most honest things I’ve read about the industry since graduating J school, a period of years when we were all fed tone-deaf and and unrealistic optimism about what was clearly a flawed business model (for instance, the McClatchy head’s video message to employees that taking on a ton of debt by buying Knight Ridder was still a smart decision, ending the video by quoting [and then playing] the song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”)

The speech to Berkeley Journalism School’s Class of 2011 earlier this month should be required reading for every recent J school grad, every person toiling away in the journalism salt mines and everyone who hasn’t abdicated the future to aggregators and partisan news outlets.

In a nut, Krulwich’s point is: stop caring about big media. The era where a job at CBS, The New York Times or Newsweek meant you had “made it,” that you had reached the plateau of your career built upon a mountain of hard scrabble reporting chops, and now you could coast for a career along with the big fish, is most certainly over. A job at the NYT is no longer an invincibility cloak.

Gay Talese on how there used to be a “celebration of alcoholism” in journalism. “One time this man was so drunk, his head just fell on this typewriter. This was the center of the New York Times.”

Talese says the folks of Mad Men have nothing on journalists: “Hell, the drinking that went on in journalism was beyond that. Drunken people all over. It’s a wonder the paper could even get out.”

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Via Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Yeah, so here’s the thing with blogging: no one notices when you are too drunk and fall asleep on your laptop at your bedroom desk, except maybe for your roommate’s cat. And she stopped expecting me to hit deadlines a long time ago.

There’s something I find endearingly quaint everytime I get an e-mail that makes me remember that I’m still signed up for the Associated Press Recruiting Center announcements. It’s kinda like still checking daily surf reports from a beach you no longer live by or looking at the weather for the town you grew up in. Ah, so young and innocent and carefree we were.

I signed up for this in probably 2006 as part of my scorched earth policy of applying for newspaper and reporter jobs from coast to coast. Which means the AP database still has some ancient, typo-ridden version of my resume, along with the oddly inspecific cover letter you have to upload as well, and my job notification preferences are probably limited to some sort of combination of entry level mid level senior level reporter copy editor news assistant in any state warm or on the West Coast or with a big city. Continue reading →